Physical-to-logical address map to speed up a recycle operation in a solid state drive

Abstract

A method for increasing performance of a recycle operation in a solid state drive, comprising the steps of (A) creating an empty physical-to-logical address map in a memory having a plurality of entry locations, (B) filling one of the plurality of entry locations with a physical page address associated with each data write operation to a block, where the block has a plurality of pages, (C) writing the physical-to-logical address map to a last of the plurality of pages during a write to a second to last page of the block and (D) initiating a recycle operation of the block by reading the address map to determine whether the pages contain valid data.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates to memory devices generally and, more particularly, to a method and / or apparatus for implementing a physical-to-logical address map to speed up a recycle operation in a solid state drive.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]A conventional solid state drive (SSD) operates differently than a hard disk drive (HDD). In a HDD, each logical block address (LBA) that a host wants to write has a fixed physical address space for the write operation. In an SSD, there is not an LBA limitation. In a conventional NAND flash, data is written in pages. If one page has been written with data, a new data needs to be written to the page. An erase operation needs to be performed on the block containing the page. After the erase, new data can be written on the page. If the data in some of the pages of the block is no longer needed (also called stale pages), only the pages with valid data in that block are read and re-written into another previously e...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The present invention provides a method for improving the performance of a solid state drive by creating an empty physical-to-logical address map, filling it with physical page addresses associated with data write operations, writing the map to a last page of a block during a write to a second to last page, and performing a recycle operation by reading the map to determine whether the pages contain valid data. This invention can speed up the recycle process in an SSD and easily determine whether a mapped block contains garbage data.

Problems solved by technology

In a conventional system, Garbage collection needs to be searched from all of the pages of one block, which is time consuming.

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